The influence of apartheid

The Ndebele and the apartheid state

When the Nationalist Party was elected to power in 1948 by a minority of the white electorate, their platform promised their followers that the white race would continue to dominate all aspects of South African society. Its ideology of "baaskap", or "white power", propounded that all black South Africans belonged to a perpetual rural proletariat, which could be trained to draw water, hew wood, and serve the wishes of its white masters, but which must ever be denied access to higher levels of education. They also held that the imposition of white rule was necessary to prevent the outbreak of "a racial holocaust", where competing tribal interests would inevitably precipitate the country into a state of violence and anarchy.

Although the nature of Nationalist policy did not change radically for the next twenty years, by the 1960s its dialectic had begun to move from its crude foundations of "white power", to a more systematized usufruct of South Africa's black population as a source of cheap labour. At the same time the Nationalist Government had begun to flesh out Apartheid into a policy of "separate-but-equal" development, which drew heavily upon the works of African-American writers who had begun to publish similar theories during the 1920s. Ultimately, it claimed, every black South African, whether living in an urban or a rural area, would be allocated to any one of nine self-governing homelands whose citizenship would be based upon the tribal, or ethnic, identity of its members. The anomalies presented by a growing black urban middle class who had found legal residence in the urban areas, and who had become increasingly distanced from its historical roots, were blithely ignored.

It is difficult to establish the exact period when the Ndebele began to develop the concept of a separate cultural polity. Their homesteads only began to be painted by their women in a distinctive polychromatic style sometime between 1937 and 1951, probably soon after the election to power of the Nationalist government in 1948. However, given their status as "Ndebele" immigrants in a highveld region inhabited predominantly by Sotho-Tswana, it is probable that the roots for this consciousness were always present and only became overtly manifest after the rise of white Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa.

Initially the establishment of an Ndebele homeland did not feature high on the Government agenda. By the early 1960s it had identified nine separate "ethnic" groups and the Ndebele were specifically excluded from these designs. Its own ethnographers believed that the groups were too scattered and numerically too few to warrant their own separate homeland. Also, they held that they had become too integrated with their Sotho and Tswana neighbours to be separated at that late stage.

It was true that the Ndebele were indeed scattered over a wide area, consisting of rural clans, labourers residing on white farms, migrating groups and urban elites, and that the two major groupings, the North and the South Ndebele, claimed separate historical roots despite widespread intermarriage. However both groups had managed to develop strong cultural identities separate from their Sotho/Tswana neighbours, which, during the 1950s were manifesting themselves in numerous tribal associations which served as a channel for migrant workers in the affairs of their rural groups and maintained links with their larger clan polities. Thus although the membership of individual groups was relatively small, cumulatively they constituted a large enough group to warrant recognition by Apartheid's planners, and as early as the 1950s they had begun to protest classification as either Tswana or Pedi.

The reality of the situation was that the ethnic cleansing necessitated by the implementation of a "bantustan" policy had already reached a scale and a level of rural hardship such as to warrant exposure by local researchers and unfavourable coverage by the international media. The removal of a widely scattered group such as the Ndebele presented Apartheid's planners with a problem which even they hesitated to implement.

Nonetheless the granting of "self-government" to Bophuthatswana and Lebowa did little to lessen the idea among many Ndebele that they too warranted a separate homeland. Although these demands were received with a certain amount of glee on the part of Apartheid bureaucrats, who saw this as justification of their ideological planning, the reality of these demands was far removed from Apartheid ideology. Much of it lay in the fact that both Bophuthatswana and Lebowa were refusing to implement separate education for their Ndebele citizens, to recognise siNdebele language, and to issue business permits, ID papers, passports, pension benefits and government jobs to Ndebele citizens who refused to forego their Ndebele identity and adopt Bophuthatswana or Lebowa citizenship.

The first known organisation which actively promoted a Ndebele identity was the Mandebele Cradle Association, founded in about 1957. They were followed in 1965 by the Ndebele Ethnic Group based in Mamelodi and Atteridgeville, and by the Ndebele National Organisation, based in Soweto. On 5 October 1967 members of various Ndebele political and cultural organisations met in Mamelodi and founded the Transvaal NNO. This was a coalition of both North and South Ndebele representing groups from both urban and rural areas. At their conference held in Mamelodi from 31 August to 1 September 1968, the call was first made for the formation of a Ndebele homeland.

Although at this stage a number of rural Ndebele Chiefs had become prominent within the TNNO, the impetus behind the organisation lay with migrant workers on the Witwaterstrand. These included a number of traders, teachers and intellectuals who perceived that their middle class aspirations would be best met by Nationalist Government's policies of "separate development."

Calls for a separate Ndebele homeland were given additional impetus in 1968, after the establishment of a Ndzundza Tribal Authority in the Weltevreden district of Lebowa. Prominent in the movement were SS Skosana, who was later to become Chief Minister of KwaNdebele, Chief David Maisha Mabhogo, Paramount of the Ndzundza, Chief Mabena of the Manala, and Chief Johannes Shikoane Kekana of the North Ndebele. Together they consolidated their grass-root support for a separate Ndebele "Bantustan". Although their efforts at first proved fruitless, by 1972 the Nationalist government had begun to look upon their demands more favourably. In March 1972 a group of Ndebele leaders and officials from the Department of Bantu Administration and Development met to discuss the issue of a separate Ndebele Homeland; by September these reached draft stage, and these were finalised in 1973. By this time four South Ndebele tribal authorities had been established: the Ndzundza, Manala and Litho, which fell under the jurisdiction of Bophuthatswana, and Pungutsa, which fell under Lebowa. The four areas were excised from the two homelands and combined into the Mnyamana regional authority, the first step in the formation of a future KwaNdebele.

On 21 April 1972 the Nationalist Government announced to the Ndebele leadership the formation of a separate homeland for the South Ndebele, despite their wishes that the two Ndebele groups be included into one governmental authority. The decision to exclude the North Ndebele was based upon advice given by government anthropologists who persisted in their opinion that this group had been well integrated into the North Sotho and Tswana societies about them and thus could not be effectively separated from their social, cultural and political contexts. The South Ndebele, on the other hand, were held to have maintained their Nguni cultural roots to a greater degree and thus to warrant separate homeland status.

It is ironic that the contradictions inherent in an ethnocentric mindset should have been so conclusively exposed by a group who supposedly supported this policy.

Despite repeated representations from North Ndebele leaders that they wished to secede from their respective Tswana and Pedi homelands, the Pretoria government remained steadfast in its decision to exclude the North Ndebele from KwaNdebele. In February 1973 they announced that henceforth, it would only deal with officially accredited chiefs on this issue, and that North Ndebele should enter into separate negotiations with the relevant Bophuthatswana and Lebowa authorities on the issue of secession from their respective administrations.

At this point the TNNO appears to have collapsed, and was replaced soon thereafter by the Northern amaNdebele National Organisation, whose aims were specifically the inclusion of the North Ndebele into KwaNdebele. These moves did not go unnoticed by the Homeland administrations of Bophuthatswana and Lebowa, both of whom began to mobilise their considerable resources of wealth and patronage in order to minimise the North Ndebele secessionist movement.

Key figures in this movement were Chief Shikoane Kekana II of Zebediela and the Rev Molomo, chair of NANO who, prior to 1973, had already been urging North Ndebele chiefs to secede from their respective homelands. Both men now began to organise their followers, through a vigorous campaign conducted both in the press and through the medium of personal mail. On 24 March 1978 Chief Kekana issued a press statement, claiming that the Ndebele "were tired of being the children of other ethnic groups by being distributed among the different homelands", and that "if the central government was prepared to go ahead with its policy of ethnic grouping, then it must be prepared to unscramble the egg" and allow each group its rights "wherever they were."

Molomo echoed the Chief's call and wrote letters to different Northern Ndebele chiefs urging them not to allow their subjects to vote in the coming Lebowa elections on the grounds that the homeland was foreign to them. Lebowa, he argued, had been established for the baPedi, and already the Northern Ndebele had been made to feel excluded. In a memorandum to Pretoria, he pointed out that only meetings related to tribal matters could be held, that Northern Ndebele teachers were prohibited from teaching the history of their people and that Northern Ndebele leaders had been incarcerated on flimsy pretexts. As history has shown, these protests fell upon deaf ears.

In 1977 the problems suffered by both Ndebele groups were compounded by the granting of "independence" to the territory of Bophuthatswana, under the leadership of Lucas Mangope. This process had begun some time earlier, in the late 1960s, when Tswana vigilantes began a programme of ethnic cleansing in Garankuwa, a black dormitory suburb of Pretoria. They began by ordering Ndebele residents to leave the township, but soon extended this to include all non-Tswana families. In time this spread to other areas, and by the time Bophuthatswana was established in 1977, non-Tswana residents were being denied identification documents, trading licenses, access to housing, social benefits and mother-language education. This persecution was especially severe against Ndebele citizens who, unlike members of other ethnic groups, did not have the benefit of a "homeland" they could move to under the provisions of Pretoria apartheid planning. Understandably Tswana chauvinism, layered over the existing system of white bigotry and Apartheid racism, led many Ndebele, Northern and Southern, to organise themselves along ethnic lines.

This process of ethnic separation needs to be understood in the larger context of Apartheid planning which initially only provided for the racial segregation of the country's four main groups, so-called European, African, Indian and Coloured. One of Apartheid's main concerns was inter-racial miscegenation, most specifically between whites and any of the three other groups, and although the Immorality laws prohibited inter-racial mixing between all four groups, the only times when these were applied was when one of the parties was white.

Ethnic separation, on the other hand, extended the scope of such chauvinism to inter-black relationships, and allowed each group to initiate its own programmes of ethnic cleansing. Needless to say, parallel developments were also taking place in the Transkei, and were soon to spread to Venda and Ciskei upon their own granting of "independence" and Lebowa and Gazankulu when they were granted "self-determination". It is not difficult to see therefore, how, by 1990, when the Nationalist government and the ANC began a process of rapprochement and pacification, the country had reached the brink of a racial and ethnic holocaust.

The Pretoria Government was not unaware of such developments, and in 1976 its representatives in the township of Ga-Rankuwa were advising non-Tswana residents to exchange their houses for dwellings elsewhere before they began to feel the full consequences of Tswana ethnic discrimination, most particularly in the field of education. Mangope reinforced this by closing down Ndebele-medium schools and by ordering his police to raid the homes of political opponents.

The neighboring "homeland" of Lebowa had been granted "self-determination" in 1969, and after its first elections in 1972, its government was led by Chief Minister Cedric N Phatudi. Although Lebowa shared in the same broad ideals of ethnic separation as the Tswana state, Phatudi was much more tactful in his dealings with Ndebele groups within his jurisdiction and, for a time, many Ndebele saw secession from Bophuthatswana and a union with Lebowa as a solution to their political aspirations. However, schisms within the secessionist movement and Phatudi's extension of political patronage to Ndebele chiefs willing to abide by his policies ensured that NANO remained a spent force in Lebowa. However, when these failed, Phatudi was not above using his police against political opponents, and in 1978 Molomo was arrested and savagely beaten by the Lebowa police. However, since they could lay no charges, he was eventually released. Chief Shikoane, on the other hand, was charged with "incitement" after he had urged his followers to boycott the Lebowa elections of 1978. Although found guilty and sentenced to a fine, Chief Shikoane continued with his campaign until the Lebowa government was able to prove a case of financial mismanagement against him. He was then deposed and replaced by one of his uncles, Mr F Mathibela Kekana, who was much more amenable to Phatudi's policies. Having lost all credibility, Shikoane retired to KwaNdebele where he died in 1981.

Despite these setbacks NANO continued with its campaign for Ndebele secession. In 1978, six South Ndebele MPs in the Lebowa government began a boycott of the Legislative Assembly, thus making common cause with the North Ndebele who had been denied access by Pretoria to a unified KwaNdebele nationhood. Although the North Ndebele were now organised under NANO, the two groups continued their dialogue and their representatives attended each other's meetings and cultural functions. However, apart from police repression and political intimidation, it was clear that the single most powerful factor standing in the way of political unification between the two groups was their physical relocation to KwaNdebele and consequent loss of ancestral lands. As a result, when KwaNdebele achieved political separation in 1981, there was no mass exodus of North Ndebele into the new "homeland."

In 1978 a number of regional authorities were constituted into the KwaNdebele Territorial Authority, and the following year it was granted legislative assembly status, the penultimate step in Pretoria's road to "independence". By 1984 it was the home to 261,875 persons of whom 5% originated from Lebowa, 29% from Bophuthatswana and 55% had been removed from white farming areas. Despite this, the tribal elites which had motivated for the establishment of a KwaNdebele state, continued to mobilise for unity between North and South Ndebele groups. Needless to say, these were ignored by Pretoria.

The critical point in the relationship between the Ndebele and their Tswana and Pedi neighbours appears to have been reached in 1982 when a move was made by Pretoria to incorporate the district of Moutse into KwaNdebele. Moutse was predominantly inhabited by the Rathoke-Ndebele, a Sotho-speaking group which had separated from the Kekana-Ndebele in the late nineteenth century. During January 1982 its councillors had met with Pretoria officials who had reported to their minister, Piet Koornhof, that the Rathoke were eager for incorporation into KwaNdebele. This eventually took place in August 1985, but only after a conflict had taken place between North Ndebele traditionalists, favouring incorporation into a larger Ndebele polity, and urban-based Ndebele, who opposed the wider concepts of Apartheid "homeland" independence.

In order to assert their authority over the district of Moutse, the political leadership of KwaNdebele had formed the Mbokodo, a vigilante group dedicated to removing opposition within the Ndebele state. On 1 January 1986 Mbokodo invaded the Moutse area, imposing upon its residents a reign of terror which has been equated to the actions of Inkatha in Kwazulu Natal during the 1980s and early 1990s. The people of Moutse responded by organising mass resistance against this intimidation, leading to a series of campaigns of civil disobedience and unrest. Faced with developments in Moutse, NANO began to reconsider its stance towards incorporation into KwaNdebele, and many North Ndebele instead began to identify with the movement against Bantustan government and for a unitary South Africa. Although plans for KwaNdebele "independence" had reached an advanced stage of definition by 1986 to the point that even its stamps had been designed and were about to be printed, the continuing waves of civil unrest within Moutse eventually spread to encompass KwaNdebele as well, and in 1987 Pretoria was forced to announce that these had been shelved indefinitely. By 1990 these had been overtaken by the CODESA negotiations, and KwaNdebele had become a footnote in South Africa's unhappy chapter of Apartheid government.

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